Win Some, Lose Some ms-69

by Brett Halliday

  Greco was past, a rich man. He gave another wild hoot and wound into the next higher gear.

  Nothing was ahead but a truck road and the flag girl. For no rational reason, merely to show her authority, she was waving her flag at him. She thought she could stop him with that puny flag? He decided to make her jump. Nice-looking cunt. Greco liked long hair on a girl, those skinny flanks. She pointed her flag, and he was struck a powerful blow on the chest, which knocked him backward out of his seat. One foot caught, and he stayed with the motorcycle. The heavy machine, no longer a friend, whipped around and came over on top of him. His scream rang back and forth inside the helmet like the screaming of more than one person. They slid twenty feet together, Greco and the Honda, through rising dust. When they came to rest, he was looking straight at the sun, but he was unable to close his eyes.

  When Werner saw the motorcycle stop near the Pontiac, he started his motor and turned on the rooftop flasher. Of course, the kidnappers could have told somebody to come and pick up the cooler, but why would they do that when it could leave unobtrusively with Benjamin himself at the end of the day?

  One of the payloaders was moving erratically. Suddenly the motorcycle burst out of the dust, with the cooler strapped to the rack. It disappeared and appeared again, playing games near the hot plant. Werner was moving. The motorcycle broke free, nearly colliding with a pickup- the pickup, he realized-then seemed to hit an obstruction at a bad angle and flipped. Werner drove up. Pam whirled.

  “He’s got the money!”

  Werner jumped out and quickly broke open the buckles. The dust from the spill was still in the air around him. Straightening, he took one step toward his car. Cars were moving out from the hot plant. A sand truck was coming in to cross. Werner had come in a police car and so was obviously a cop. But a real cop wouldn’t take off again an instant after arriving at the scene of an accident this bad. He couldn’t make up his mind. And he was still standing there, holding the cooler, being pulled in several directions at once, when the sand track came up. The driver looked at the fallen motorcycle. The front wheel was folded. The biker, covered with blood, looked almost as battered as his machine and considerably more fragile.

  “Jesus Christ,” the truck driver said. “I’ve got a kid myself who wants one of those Hondas. Not with my money! Anything I can do?”

  “We’ll take care of it,” Werner told him.

  The truck pulled past, and Werner swung the cooler over the tailgate into the sand. It slid down the cone-shaped pile, out of sight from below.

  Pam was trembling badly. Werner’s move with the cooler-whether that was smart or dumb, there was no way to call it back now-had caused him to unfreeze. He looked into the pickup. What he saw there drove him back several steps. Before he could freeze again, he snatched Pam’s gun and threw it into the front seat beside the dead man.

  “Don’t tell Downey,” he said. “Half million for you. Half million for me. Fuck him. You don’t know a thing!”

  Pam began shuddering, taking deep breaths and letting them out on a rising note. That was all right. She had witnessed a double shooting, and nobody would be surprised if she came slightly unglued. And all at once her orange vest seemed to break open from inside. Blood spurted out. The motorcyclist on the ground was holding his long gun in both hands. The barrel wavered and fell back.

  Werner was too late to catch Pam as she fell. The yellow hat went bouncing away. He turned her over. After the first hard spurt, the blood was welling out of her chest like a pool overflowing. She tried to speak. Bubbles came out. He let her down. He wasn’t thinking of her at all, he was thinking about the money.

  He clapped on her hard hat and automatically stopped being a cop and changed into a construction worker. He ran toward the cars, gesturing.

  “They shot-killed-”

  There were enough other things to look at so he got away with it. Other cars gathered. He doubled over and was sick in the dirt. It was real bile, real vomit. Very pale, his hand to his mouth, he turned his back to the confused scene and walked away. His rented car with the flasher would be left over when everything got sorted out. That would be hours from now. No one would make the connection.

  He walked all the way through. Without looking to see who was watching, he crossed the access road and the highway. He made a wide detour through the tangled undergrowth, going into swamp water up to his knees, and circled back. A great irrigation conduit ran under the road at this point. He ducked down and went in, walking through a tiny sluggish trickle of water. The second half of the conduit had been tied in, but not yet covered with dirt.

  He stopped several feet short of the mouth, in dark shadow. He could see the sand pile. The dump trucks were feeding the pile on the opposite side from the payloader.

  Shayne, in the payloader cab, was a half mile from the action, his view partly obscured by the moving dust. He gave quiet instructions to the sheriff’s deputies. One police car, its blinker working, was on its way in from the highway. He was outside the cab, about to drop to the ground, when Benjamin called him back. He was in time to see the Honda and a pickup apparently collide. The Honda flipped and threw its rider. A sand truck crossed the highway, paused, and went on.

  Shayne’s was the fourth car to reach the scene. DeLuca and the man he had imported to kill Canada had shot and killed each other, and the flag girl had been hit during the exchange. She was dying. The Styrofoam cooler was no longer strapped to the motorcycle.

  These deaths were sheriff’s business, and the deputies had already begun the lengthy process of picking up. Shayne took the ranking deputy aside and asked for permission to search the pickup and the cars.

  The man gave him a hard look. “This is your show, Mike. Go ahead, but you know we’re going to need a lot more than you’ve given us so far. Am I permitted to ask what you’re looking for?”

  “The Styrofoam cooler that was on the back of the Honda.”

  “A beer cooler? Three people are dead here, Mike. They weren’t arguing about beer.”

  “Probably not,” Shayne agreed.

  Two feet by one foot by a foot and a half, the cooler would be a hard thing to conceal. By the time Frieda arrived, Shayne had decided it must have bounced off the carrier during the jolting ride. But Frieda was sure it had still been on the motorcycle when it sheared away from the pickup and went down.

  “We were facing the wrong way, with the bucket up. I lost track of him when he went under the belts. When he came out in the open again, the first thing I looked for was the cooler. It was definitely there, Mike.”

  Shayne looked at the tire tracks again. Squatting, he drew a diagram in the dirt. The only vehicle he couldn’t account for was the sand truck, one in the long anonymous succession of trucks feeding the piles. He thought for a moment, rubbing his sandpapery jaw.

  “It’s a longshot, but we might as well try it.”

  He drove back to the payloader. The mixing tank, at the center of the great spiderweb, continued to be fed, to revolve, to disgorge. The landscaping and finishing crews were coming in to park their working vehicles and go home. The hot plant would go on working as long as it had daylight. A new load of sand was being dumped at the far side of the pile.

  Climbing into the cab, Shayne told Benjamin, “Let’s rotate. Get some of the new sand that’s come in in the last half hour.”

  In the mouth of the culvert, Werner was making plans. The police had two dead men and a dead girl. That would keep them busy for hours. But they wouldn’t be here all night. Werner was more worried about Benjamin and Vaughan. And he was worried about Downey. He could see Downey’s car outside the control trailer, but Downey himself must be off with the other cops, trying to make sense of the multiple shootings. Like Benjamin and Vaughan, he would be looking for two things-a Styrofoam box and Werner.

  Werner was lying almost in the water, so he wouldn’t show up if anybody looked in the opposite end. The plan he settled on finally was to wait until just before daylight, if
he could hold still that long. The lights would be on tonight, but they wouldn’t reach to the far side of the sand pile. He had been counting loads. Only one more load had been dropped on top of the cooler. It would be easy digging. He couldn’t hope to get home with the money tonight. He had to do it in stages. He would take it out through the culvert, bury it in the woods, marking the spot well, and come back for it later.

  Downey would be just as baffled by these events as everybody else. Werner now knew that in smartness and toughness he was Downey’s equal, if not his superior. All he lacked was experience, and he was getting that fast. With Pam dead-

  And it really hit him for the first time. She actually was dead, all over, from the crown of her head to her toes. They had made love for the last time. They had been antagonists all along, even more so at the end. They had both changed under pressure. It would have been interesting to see which one ended up with the money.

  He thought it would be safe now to doze a little. He was starting a long, hard period of waiting. The rhythmic clanking was more and more soothing. The payloader lunged, swung, tipped, and came back. Suddenly Werner snapped awake. It was changing position.

  It maneuvered around the circle, where it seemed to hesitate for an instant; then it attacked. Instead of starting at shoulder level, the bucket dropped to the ground and made its first gouge there. It came up and around. Werner watched, more and more appalled. He had lined up the spot carefully so he would know where to dig. And it had planted itself at that exact spot.

  His head whirling, he put on the yellow hat and dropped from the culvert. If the money didn’t come out in the first bite, it was sure to come in the second or third, and he knew one thing for certain-he couldn’t just sit there and watch. He had to do something. At the hot plant, sand from the bin drained steadily onto the bottom-most scoops of the belt. He had no idea how long the bin took to empty. He had to be there when the cooler dropped out. There was enough confused movement around and beneath the mixer so that he might be able to knock it off the belt without being seen.

  As long as he was moving, he had a place in the pattern. He would become conspicuous the instant he stopped. He slowed down, and he was fifteen feet from the belt when there was an interruption in the smooth flow of sand. The cooler broke out of the mouth of the hopper.

  Each segment of the belt slanted in toward the center to hold the sand. The cooler rode upward serenely, moving surprisingly fast. Werner had started running, but by the time he was in position, it was already inches out of reach.

  The aperture in the tank’s face was twenty-five feet from the ground. Without stopping to think, Werner leaped on the belt and scrambled up on all fours, pedaling hard. He gained a yard, slipped, and lost it again. He clawed upward, touching the cooler for an instant and knocking it off center. The dolphin on the lid seemed to be sneering at him. He drove again, and his foot went through the sand and caught between two of the V-shaped segments.

  He tried to kick free, losing more ground. There were less than three feet to go now. He reached out desperately, and his fingers again grazed the Styrofoam. But it was firmly lodged, and it rode on to the top, tilted, and went in.

  Werner’s car was still there, near the pickup and the bodies, but no Werner. Downey looked for Benjamin and found him where he was supposed to be, up in his payloader. Mike Shayne was with him! Downey tried to find out from the sheriff’s people what the idea was, what they were trying to do, but they didn’t know much. Somebody thought there had been a kidnapping; that was the rumor that was going around. Downey’s own status was a trifle uncertain. True, Larry Canada was one of his specialties, but he hadn’t cleared it with anybody, and about all he could do was hang on the edge and listen.

  Too many stimuli were crowding in on Downey at once, and his circuits were overloaded. People were running. He saw Werner first, in a hard hat, then above him on the belt the Styrofoam cooler, the money. It would be gone in another minute. Dumb, dumb. The kid had been focusing so hard on that box that when he saw it on the belt he climbed up and went after it. What if he did knock it off? From the beginning, Downey had known he couldn’t afford to let Werner go in for questioning because he would surely answer those questions. Names would be named. This was trouble, real trouble.

  Instead of moving toward the belts like everybody else, Downey stepped backward into the lee of the power cart. His gun had jumped into his hand.

  One of the payloaders was swinging. The money dropped into the asphalt, and for an instant Downey thought Werner was going in after it, which would have solved that particular problem. One foot was tangled. He was face down, holding on with his full strength. He went into the hole in the face-plate, around the roller, and a second later he came back out on the underside of the belt, upside down. Somebody finally punched the right button and the belt stopped.

  Werner was dangling twenty feet in the air. The payloader started a quick maneuver to get the bucket beneath him. Downey gave one look in both directions, half turned, and shot Werner off the belt.

  The trapped foot pulled free when it took the full weight of Werner’s body, and he fell into the gears.

  Chapter 20

  The gears had to be disassembled to get Werner out. No attempt was made to recover the beer cooler, for the Styrofoam would have disintegrated the instant it hit the hot oil. The next morning when the gears were reassembled and the hot plant resumed operation, the box and whatever had been inside it would be paved into the next stretch of highway.

  The parents of the dead flag girl, in West Palm Beach, were notified of their daughter’s death. They refused to believe it because their daughter, unquestionably alive, had just walked into the house. Other pieces dropped into place. Canada, who had spent the day in the van, was shown the bullet-ridden portable toilet. He loosened his neck inside his collar and gave Shayne a look of grudging respect. The muffled radio on the closed toilet seat had taken three slugs. If, instead of the radio, Canada had been sitting there, all three would have gone in near the base of his spine.

  “You figured that one out, Shayne,” he said. “Funny-I never thought Lou was that much of a threat. I thought he took it out on the golf balls and the tennis balls.”

  Shayne met him by arrangement the following morning outside the County Courthouse on East Flagler, where the bids on the Everglades spur were to be opened at nine. Having had a night to think over his predicament, Canada was experiencing more complicated feelings. It was no longer a simple matter of being glad he was alive.

  “I’ve heard from a few people, Shayne. They put up some of that million, and the idea is, they want it back.”

  “Too bad. You may have to go into Chapter Eleven.”

  “Go bankrupt? Well, yeah, but these people, twenty cents on the dollar is not the way they like to get paid. I went along with your idea because I expected to recover that money. Hell, when that series of Rourke’s gets rolling, I’ll be spending most of my time in courtrooms. I’ll need it for legal fees.”

  “Sorry, Larry. I never promised I could keep everything under control. There were too many wild cards, deuces and threes and one-eyed Jacks. What did you have for breakfast?”

  Canada gave him a savage look. “I ate my normal breakfast. What do you think, I’m going on a diet because things haven’t been breaking right?”

  He walked away, the back of his neck red with anger. Shayne and Frieda found places in the chamber where the bids would be opened. Rourke gave Shayne a two-fingered salute. The media people clotted around Canada, but Rourke left him alone, having had his interview the day before. It had lasted six hours, and Rourke had been up most of the night writing an insider’s view of the carnage at Homestead, and the next article in the highway series. Both his city editor and managing editor had come to the bid-opening because Rourke had promised more fireworks. All the TV channels had sent units.

  Philip Gold, the Highway Commissioner, looking nearly as dapper as usual, arrived with a small staff. As he passed Shay
ne and Frieda, they caught a strong wash of perfume, a musky fragrance that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on a bull moose. Frieda whispered, “He must want us to love him in spite of everything.”

  Gold took his place at the front of the chamber and asked if there were any last-minute bids. Parties of technicians from all the big contracting firms, including Canada’s, had been busy in the corridor, scribbling changes and making their final quotes. The envelopes were hastily sealed. Canada’s, as usual, came up last. Canada himself was sitting back, smiling. As everybody knew, his instinct was infallible. He invariably guessed right and gave the lowest bid by a narrow margin.

  Gold put on heavy glasses and took a letter opener out of an attache case. Everybody involved in the process began writing furiously as he opened each envelope and read out the figure. The bids, as always, varied so widely that the estimators seemed to be bidding on different jobs. Finally only two bidders were left to be heard from. One was a huge Georgia firm, B. and B. Contractors, which had made a number of attempts to break into Florida highways and had invariably been beaten back. Gold’s hands, as he arranged the envelopes, were concealed behind a low rail, and he managed to substitute a different envelope for B. and B. Rourke and Shayne, however, had come early to position a mirror above and behind him, high up to the right of the flag. It was the action in this mirror that the TV cameras were recording. Gold’s attache case was open beside him. He read out a figure. There was a murmur in the room. So far B. and B. had it, with only Canada still to be heard from. Again Gold did a sleight of hand with several envelopes hidden in his case, all sealed, all identical except for the bids inside. Shayne had seen these envelopes before, when Canada gave them to Gold at the meeting in the construction trailer. The letter opener snicked. Gold called out a figure. By several tens of thousands, it was higher than the one from the Georgia firm.